Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem | Tino / 1985

cruising for eternal love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem (screenwriters and directors) Tino / 1985

 

The French queer intellects, Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s, campy film Tino—released six years after their significant essayistic work Race d’Ep (1979)—is certainly not one of their most important endeavors, but it’s still fun to watch, and at moments quite chilling, as a wealthy American tourist couple played by journalist and gay activist Douglas Ireland and noted French actress and singer Myriam Mézières buy the services of a young Tunisian boy, Tino (Khaled Mahmoud).

     After a brief salute to all things Mediterranean, including the cultures, the architect, the religions, the shipping, even the water itself—as well as prostitution— Myriam is seen in a chauffeured automobile rumbling across the beach sands where it stops a feet away from several young men playing beach soccer. Once they spot the car they rush towards it, each of them hoping to be invited in for whatever pleasure, perhaps even a role as a gigolo for the beautiful American woman. But a particularly beautiful young man, Tino, finally pulls his friends away, Myriam taking a careful look at his “qualifications.”

      Taking off her sunglasses, she salutes him as her “Gabriel,” her “angel,” and quickly asks him to get in. When, soon after, she attempts to take him into her Tunis hotel, she is met by the hotel security guard who attempts to eject the young man from entering—“we have our reputation to think  of”—Myriam screaming and shouting at him in defiance, the way some wealthy Americans behave everywhere they go. The scene reminds of the earlier 1975 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fox and His Friends, where Eugen and Fox pick up a local Arab boy in Morocco, also refused entry, this time into hotel restaurant, the hotel management assuring them that have their own male escorts for such occasions.

      In this case, the insistently loud American wins, she and her husband, Henry, soon pulling the half-naked boy onto the terrace to have drinks, hilariously served up by the waiter with Tino’s soccer ball. And before long the two have literally moved him to a vertical position of the beach where Myriam is busy rubbing suntan lotion across his abs before slipping her hand below in to his swimming trunks.

       The couple soon after take in an evening film, evidently a production about the Roman emperor Hadrian’s infamous lover, Antinous the boy Hadrian who as Myriam reminds her new pickup died young—interestingly, given the role water plays throughout this short film, he inexplicably drowned in the Nile, Hadrian himself, like the couple, also being an inveterate traveler—and who Hadrian, still desperately in love with the boy turned into a god in both the Egyptian world, associating him with the cult Osiris, the god of the dead (also associated with the mud of the Nile) and in the Greek world with its Dionysian cult of fertility, madness, and hedonistic sexual activity, the last two of which, at least, are roles Tino does indeed perform with the couple, who equally claim his sexual favors.

      After attending the film starring David Bowie, it is Tino himself who begins to imagine himself in the Roman epic that winds its way through this sordid tale, he seemingly finding as much pleasure in being desired by Henry as he does by his more mundane sexual encounters with the wife.

      To my knowledge, Bowie never made such a film, but it is great fun, and almost a natural jibe given that at the time of Soukaz and Hocquenghem’s film the singer was rumored to have had many a bedroom fling with Mick Jagger and recently performed with him in Dancing in the Street (1985). The Italian title, The Living God is, of course, another comment on Bowie—about the adulation of one of his fans as much as the singer’s own ego—but is obviously what Tino would like to be, particularly given his self-perceived good fortune.

      Other than constantly stroking the boy, Henry seems mostly a man of coarse words, and in Tino’s imaginative world shouts out his demands that the boy become a sacred god, while his wife mostly sits and sulks, particularly when Henry is around.

       Early on in the silly “swords and sandals” episodes, the co-director Guy Hocquenghem, performing as a Roman associate of Hadrian’s takes Tino  into the coronation room where he is declared his true beloved, with the boy even willing to dance like a woman in front of his emperor, a role quickly taken over by Henry’s wife to re-establish her reality as a true woman in a world of mostly young men fawning on Hadrian’s/Henry’s every move.

      The couple, with Tino in their party, are soon on they are on their way to Greece.

    It is in Greece where he explains to the boy, probably without his comprehension, that the two, husband and wife, have agreed early in their marriage to share everything. Besides he’s pretty sure, he brags to his wife, Tino prefers boys, “after all he’s an Arab.” “I tell you what,” he shouts out, “you take the front I’ll take the rear...the butt!”

     Confused by their bickering about him, Tino again imagines his role in Hadrian’s Rome, the man who apparently had sexual relationships only with boys and never with his wife. Once again, he does not seem to mind the ugly Hadrian, any more than the unpleasant Henry pawing him. After all, he has been exalted in his performative roles!

    Only when Henry refuses to join them in their exploration of a ruin, does Tino join her in full heterosexual behavior, fucking her as she stands against the ruined pillars as, with the cornball sexual pun, fireworks light up the sky.

      But the sexual interlude ends badly, with Henry slapping his wife to the ground and verbally abusing her, as somehow she has performed it purposely to embarrass him in front of a crowd.

    Again Tino imagines himself in Hadrian’s court, this time undergoing what appears to be a ceremonial marriage to Hadrian, a veil over his face, perhaps suggesting their being initiated together into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Furious, with the ceremony, his wife after belittling the activities, stalks out. And soon after Hocquenghem playing the same role in which he earlier brought Tino into the court, appears with a dagger in his hand in an attempt to kill Antinous, again perhaps a reference to the jealousy of Hadrian’s other possible lover Lucius Ceionius Commodus. Without Tino moving a muscle, the competitor for Hadrian’s love falls dead, Antinous/Tino being celebrated for the deed. 

     The next scene in the contemporary world of the trio places them in positions that seem to indicate a closure to their affair, as if the party were over, the celebration having left them in a kind of drunken limbo.

     It is New Year’s Eve we soon discover, and the location is a subway, maybe in New York, since Myriam discusses with Harry the absurdity of walking down 5th Avenue with the apparently sleeping boy. They pour champagne over him and he awakens, as they finally turn to catch the next arrival. But before they can do so, three men, obviously also from Tino’s country, seeing him with the couple, go to him and berate him and plead with him to give up his shocking behavior. The drunken trio dismiss them, Tino blowing a party puffer into their faces; the other three turn and enter the subway car stopped before them.

     Suddenly we see Tino running for the same subway, the doors having just closed, and him attempting to get inside. He follows the car as it pulls away, moving blindly with it until he hits a pole in his path and falls to the floor, his forehead bloody from the crash, forcing us to wonder if he is now dead.

     Most definitely La commedia e finita!

     Obviously, the filmmakers suggest, things do not go well for those who take up with such horrifying consumers, who eat up people the way they might swallow up the food and customs of different cultures merely for the thrill of the momentary difference. In a sense Henry and his wife are merely sexual cruisers, out for the thrill not for the eternal love Hadrian felt for Antinous.

      It may be useful to recall what Guy Hocquenghem wrote in his 1973 essay, “The Screwball Asses” in Recherches, a selection posted in this context by Dorothée Perret on the blog PARISLA:

     

“The cruising machine has established an impenetrable border between what turns us on and what makes us think. This border is perhaps a defense mechanism against the intrusion of relations of power…

     Constructed like capitalism against death, the cruising machine… instead of being madly in love with what is present, it desires what is absent, it always desires the next object, it constructs itself on the establishment and sacred assumption of lack, according to the absolute criteria of consumption…

      If I leave my house to enjoy the weather, to buy bread or go see a friend, and if I come upon a boy that I like, gay or not, I am blissfully enjoying the present. But if I leave my house every night to find another queer by cruising the places where other queers hang around, I am nothing but a proletarian of my desire who no longer enjoys the air or the earth, and whose masochism is reduced to an assembly line.

     In my entire life, I have only ever really met what I was not trying to seduce.”

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).